Collect Calls
by Les Phillips

The learned moralist Joel Schumacher has directed a film which endorses honest, old-fashioned, Frank Capra-style American values. It's bad to think about committing adultery, and it's important to be nice to people who deliver pizza. And there's nothing, nothing lower than a career as a publicist. If you are one of these wicked, immoral, selfish people. you really need to wake up and smell the coffee; otherwise, a psychotic sniper might threaten to kill your wife and friends, might even kill you. That would teach you, wouldn't it?

The Everyman of this moral exercise is played by Colin Farrell, who will almost certainly lead a God-fearing life when it's all over, if he survives. This sounds like a terrible movie, but it isn't. Despite the silly sermonizing, despite the idiotic, showoff high-tech opening, despite the many implausibilities, Phone Booth is a "taut suspense thriller," as Joel Siegel might say, and perhaps already has. Farrell is fun to watch, and his New York accent is convincing somehow without being authentic - the slight undercurrent of Irish lilt is charming. Kiefer Sutherland plays the sadistic, threatening voice; it's the best thing in the movie.

As a suspense narrative, it's beautifully constructed. You still won't believe a bit of it if your mind pauses for more than a minute and a half, but that's not likely to happen. In the first ten minutes of the film, authentic New York street stuff gives way to what is either a backlot set or some street in Toronto, unless I miss my guess. The (film) neighborhood around 8th and 53rd seems plentiful in sex shops and hookers; that hasn't been true in years. And, of course, the entire conceit involving the "last enclosed phone booth in Manhattan" is pretty lame. None of this ends up mattering at all; Phone Booth is scary.

There is certainly a great deal of Latin whooping and hollering going on in Frida. Ten minutes into the film, I became convinced that the lives of the artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera were going to be represented by a succession of scenes in which Salma Hayek whacks Alfred Molina over the head with a rolling pin. (Caramba!) It turns out that I wasn't that far wrong.

Julie Taymor, the genius behind the staging of The Lion King on Broadway, directed Frida. The film's strongest features are the very creative animated and/or expressionistic sequences that Taymor interpolates into the action. In one particularly powerful scene, Taymor's mad visuals express Kahlo's pain after an accident which put her in a wheelchair. The color in the film is also wonderful; Mexico looks lush but also fresh and new. All of this innovation is paid for with a very conventional storyline. Kahlo and Rivera were important artists, they were Communists, and they got a lot of nookie with various partners.

Frida does a below average job of dramatizing what it's like to be an artist, even by Hollywood biopic standards. I'm not sure it even tries to do that, to be perfectly honest. Revolutionary commitment is represented by a lot of yelling, a fair bit of drinking, a willignness to sass Nelson Rockefeller, and a lot of sex. Once these subjects are disposed of, Frida can get right down to the nookie itself, and the resultant accusations and recriminations, much more yelling, etc. It must be said that Frida never wavers in its commitment to cultural and historical context. The screenplay knows that Leon Trotsky is a very important person, and he's treated with due reverence. He's a very important person because he ends up sleeping with Frida Kahlo. After such bliss, what but the icepick...

The screenplay is broad throughout, but inconsistent; sometimes it is broad and smooth, sometimes broad and clunky. At one point the screenwriters want us to know that Frida's father is a German Jew. So her father says, "I am a German Jew." The acting throughout is perfectly competent. Salma Hayek has some passionate, weeping, caterwauling scenes; she does them creditably. But her Academy Award nomination seems to have had a lot more to do with the art of publicity than the art of mimesis.

Moonlight Mile is a disappointment. If Dustin Hoffman is going to pass into old age doing fusty, gruff, mannered character turns, I'm not going to like him any more. (Here he sounds all too much like his parody of Robert Evans from The Kid Stays in the Picture, or even a little like Mumbles in Dick Tracy.)

But it's the screenplay that is really the problem. Moonlight Mile is about a couple who can't cope with the fact that their daughter has been recently murdered -- so, in different ways, they all but adopt their daughter's fiancé. He doesn't want to be adopted. He has some issues of his own. There's not much else.

With this cast, I half expected that the actors would fill in the vacuum with some wonderful acting. Susan Sarandon gets everything she can out of her character; Jake Gyllenhaal can't quite figure out what his character is; Hoffman mutters and mffhhs. And Brad Silberling's screenplay and direction tend toward cliché and convention. In different parts and different ways, Moonlight Mile resembles In the Bedroom, Before and After, and a few other films I could name; that doesn't help matters. Gyllenhaal is still amazing to watch, even when he doesn't quite nail the character. I don't think anyone else likes him as much I do. Is he becoming a sort of male Jennifer Jason Leigh?

©2003 Les Phillips
CineScene